Abstract for: Pandemic Influenza and Complex Adaptive Systems of Systems (CASoS) Engineering

We present the story of our involvement in the formulation of the US’s policy for mitigating pandemic influenza. At the heart of this formulation was modeling but in its actualization was interaction, drive, serendipity, hard work and advocacy for the use of models to select robust policy in the face of great uncertainty. Reflecting on this entire process and others where high impact influence has been achieved has led us to a recognition that nearly all the systems that we wish to influence can be categorized as Complex Adaptive Systems of Systems or CASoS and that our field of endeavor is CASoS Engineering.